Abandoned in Burger King as baby, woman searches for her mother

Twenty-seven years ago, a woman left Katheryn Deprill in an Allentown restroom. Deprill wants to meet her.

Katheryn Deprill of South Whitehall holds her baby book. She learned when… (MICHAEL KUBEL, THE MORNING…)

March 04, 2014|By Dan Sheehan, Of The Morning Call

To begin with, Katheryn Deprill has a good life: a husband, three children — all boys, all feisty — and a long-term plan to step up from emergency medical technician to paramedic.

She's a pretty woman with long, sandy hair, big blue eyes and features that hint at a Scandinavian heritage, or maybe Irish. Deprill doesn't know for certain. And she'll never know for sure, unless the woman who gave birth to her 27 years ago and abandoned her hours later in the bathroom of an Allentown fast food restaurant finally identifies herself.

Readers with long memories will remember the 1986 case of the Burger King Baby. A woman having coffee at the South Fourth Street restaurant found her in the women's restroom — a squalling newborn swaddled in a maroon sweatshirt and lying atop a white plastic bag.

Despite some promising early leads, the mother of the Burger King baby remained a mystery. But now, using the tools of social media, Deprill, of South Whitehall Township, has launched a concerted effort to find her.

She has posted her plea on Facebook — a photo in which she holds a handwritten sign bearing a plaintive message: "Looking for my birth mother. She gave birth to me September 15th, 1986. She abandoned me in the Burger King bathroom only hours old, Allentown, PA. Please help me find her by sharing my post. Maybe she will see this. Thank you."

The post has already been shared thousands of times by other users. Deprill has also reached out to newspapers and television stations.

She knows her mother might be reluctant to respond. That's why she wants her to know that she is faring well in life, that she is neither angry nor resentful nor seeking anything beyond a few answers: What's my background? My medical history? Why did you leave me behind?

She is curious, yes, and grateful that she was left to be found and not abandoned to die.

"I would like to say thank you to her, that she did not throw me away," Deprill said Monday, sitting in the conference room of the Greenawalds Fire Company in South Whitehall where her husband is an emergency medical technician.

On the table in front of her was a memory book compiled by her adoptive parents, Brenda and Carl Hollis, who then made their home in Upper Milford Township but have since moved to Topton.

It contains all the usual keepsakes of infancy and early childhood: a lock of hair from her first haircut, finger paint handprints, a birthday card from her brother with a $5 bill still tucked inside.

But it also contains a police officer's typewritten narrative of the Burger King baby investigation, and a scattering of newspaper clippings about the case.

Deprill saw this book for the first time when she was 12. She was in sixth grade in the East Penn School District. The teacher that year asked students to prepare a meal rooted in their ethnic heritage.

Deprill knew she had been adopted, but nothing beyond that. She went home and asked her parents how she could cook an ethnic meal without knowing her ethnicity.

It was time, the Hollises decided, for Katheryn to know the facts. They pulled out the memory book and told her to have a look.

To that point, Deprill had harbored the notion that her adoptive parents knew who her birth parents were, and that there had been some compelling reason she had been given up for adoption — a reason she would one day learn.

She had stopped telling people she was an adoptee in third grade, after she told classmates that her mother could make costumes for the class play, and one of them said, "Your real mom or your pretend mom?"

That hurt. But nothing had prepared her for what she learned as she leafed through the book and read the newspaper clippings and police report.

"It was dropped on me," she said, "that I was known as the Burger King Baby."

Employee Robert Wilson arrived at Burger King at 5:30 a.m., an hour before opening. It was Monday. He took the garbage out and swept the parking lot.

Around 7 a.m., he heard a baby crying but thought nothing of it, assuming someone was changing a diaper inside the women's room.

An hour later, he heard crying again, and began to think something was amiss. He approached a customer, Libby Landis, who had stopped for coffee. She had heard the crying, too. Wilson asked her to check the women's room.

Landis opened the door and saw the tiny figure on the floor.

She touched nothing and alerted Wilson. The police were summoned, and the mystery began.

Wilson told police he could remember seeing only one person who might fit the profile of a young mother: a woman in her early 20s, with collar-length, frizzy hair of sandy brown. She was driving a blue car of early 1970s vintage, and had pulled out of the parking lot and headed south on Fourth Street.